The age of the buildings is a constant reminder of time and how the cities of this country are so old compared to those of the US.  I loved the combinations of materials and the juxtapositions of the modern and the ancient.

There’s a poetry in walls and surfaces, in their colors and textures and crumbling and mosses and cracks and blotches.

You could look up at a series of facades, or out a window at a jumble of humble small houses with skyscrapers in the background and ugly commercial buildings of the 60s in between, marveling at the people and activities that had produced them.  In Great Britain, one’s sense of history and time is acute.  And so much is familiar in a “I’ve heard and read about this all my life” sense.  I can just imagine what it will be like when we go to Italy!